The ego carries out the roles
That family and friends recognize –
And never, ever, forgets the specific part it’s supposed to play.

A lifetime passes
During which we’re regularly fed, entertained, and comforted –
But this type of quotidian ego can never reflect the person we really could have been –
That is, someone who solely serves God –
And whose real name is “Freedom.”

Everyone wants the same thing –
A good community for their children to grow up in
And, if their descendants so choose, the same place for future generations.

People want a meaningful God to worship –
A God who encourages goodness, spontaneity, and creativity.

People want love between husbands and wives to be and remain real,
And freedom for their children to “be themselves,”
Along with friends who they’re happy to spend time with
As well as an openness to joy – (not just satisfaction or happiness)
But pure joy.

They want to experience the world getting better
With violence, nihilism, and hatefulness falling away.

They want their intellectuals to have common sense –
While still preferring to “think for themselves” –
And they’ll take all the time necessary to sort through
The value of what they’re presented with
So as to make intelligent-loving decisions.

Everyone wants the same thing –
Good neighbors – (next door, county, state, and country) –
And they’ll also want to know that, as they age, they’ll be on a natural arc
Of becoming more loving, more wise,
And more accepting of others.

Finally, they want God to be their best friend –
A God who’ll walk out ahead of them, pointing out what’s good,
What they should seriously treasure, and, ultimately,
What’s important to be retained for life beyond our physical life –
The one we can’t now see or experience, but hope will be there
When it finally comes time for us to go.

Aren’t all the historical “gods”
Just symbolic collections of mass popular cultural “egos”

Intensely promoted so all the little egos have a Big Ego to pray to
And, consequently, be validated – giving “meaning” to their lives.

However, “collective” meaning has no meaning at all.

Both little egos and Big Egos are a waste of time –
Only freedom matters
Because freedom empowers us to address “reality”
Which, by definition, is constantly changing –
And why we need freedom to do likewise.

The opposite of freedom is being trained to respond to others unthinkingly –
So, when others think you should be jumping, you jump –
Or when others think you should be more beautiful, you try to make yourself beautiful –
Or when they think you should be more successful, you do your best to appear successful.

Yes, from birth on, people are trained to be responsive to others –
That is, to sacrifice their freedom in order to “get along.”

The question each of us faces is how to become free
Without tipping over into selfishness or destructiveness.

The answer is simple – yet quite difficult in practice –
You have get awake and then resist falling back asleep –
The answer is to give up your ego and, as Marguerite says, “become love.”

This is what God has always wanted –
But established religions demand many other and additional things –
Things that simply don’t count.

The answer is simple – yet not obvious –
The answer is – it’s not easy –

As Marguerite (the “Pearl”) says:
“True freedom is when one becomes love!”

Like the wind –
Like passing thoughts –
Like faint memories of the future.

From the beginning, people were fearful of being alone.

Before people made anything, before planting fields of wheat,
Before brewing beer and having fun, and before establishing permanent places to live –
They created “Gods”
And placed them high up on a shelf – served by priests –
Who then required reciprocal services, in turn, from everyone else.

When a God dies – the city also dies along with all the surrounding countryside –
Then, finally, the people’s very identity starts dying –
Because they believed in the wrong thing –
Because they didn’t understand that freedom comes before “God” –
Because they didn’t appreciate that God actually is freedom!

No person possessing an ego will ever see the real God
Because the ego is blind to itself – and to everything else as well.

No person lacking freedom will experience joy either –
Because joy thrives only in a world of unlimited freedom.

Historically, archaeologists have discovered Gods living inside other Gods
Like Russian nesting dolls –
There are also ladders inside our souls that go nowhere –
Because where there’s no spiritual orientation there can be no freedom either.

People have forgotten their love of God
So no longer remember what the opposite of despair looks like –
Instead, they’ve ended up inside materialistic media mirrors
And a desire, mainly, for morning to night entertainment.

If you want to be “like” God, you have to let your ego “self” go –
For to be like God is to become nothing –
Because as a no “thing” you’ll have opened yourself up to freedom.

As soon as we start becoming “somebody” or “something,”
Or commit to any external concepts or ideas,
Our freedom starts becoming restricted.

For us, to be “spontaneous” is to be “human” in a similar way that God is “God.”

Religions’ founders, in their holy books, always point towards spiritual freedom
But, unfortunately, these same books were transcribed and edited by followers,
Not founders,
Who diligently worked at limiting human freedom
To fit their own version of the founder’s vision
So that people could return to being “properly” controlled –
Much as they had been before.

As a consequence, religious institutions basically preach
And teach different kinds of spiritual control,
Even though the “God” manifested by the founders continues to remind us
Of the inherent essentiality of spiritual freedom.

Remember, God is “absolutely free” –
And that’s what God has always wanted for us too.

Most of the time, however, rather than taking a spiritually spontaneous path,
People find it easier to go in a materialistic or spiritual-materialistic direction
In which they have to give up freedom
In order to become whatever they’ve been told “their God” wants –
And whatever, in the particular culture they’ve grown up in,
That they’re “supposed” to become.

Like this:

“To be empty of all created things is to be full of God, and to be full of created things is to be empty of God.” Meister Eckhart

We need to achieve a radical detachment from our “ego self”
In order to attain the kind of freedom we’ll need
To “find” God, much less to “be with” God –
That is, a detachment from “power” of every kind, type, and form –
Whether political, financial, celebrity, or personal.

Human beings, by nature, originally were (and still largely are) weak and vulnerable
However, it’s only those capable of acknowledging their weakness and vulnerability
Who’ll be permitted to approach closer to God.

If we let ourselves (that is, our egos) go – that is to say, if we can give up our false selves –
We’ll end up being able to let everything else go also.

More – we’ll not only permit all that to go –
We’ll also be able to let all our traditional “Gods” go too.

To achieve purity of spirit – we need to “want” nothing, “know” nothing, and “have” nothing –
Giving us the freedom to become aware of a numinous “True God”
Who lives “way out” beyond all the standard church and temple gods –
Just like our “true self” can be found only way out – far beyond our tiny ego-self.

Here, in the First World, minds are the highest-valued aspect of humanity –

A splendid mind, as a great analytical tool, can get you into the Ivy League
And, later, qualify you for the top one percent.

Nevertheless, we are not minds alone – we’re not simply mental tools.

Minds, over a lengthy period of time, develop in a surrounding cultural sea –
And take on the “color” and “imprint” of their birth society.

In order to get outside our socially-cultivated mind and gain the freedom
To think and feel objectively,
Paradoxically, we have to get “out of our minds” –
Which, of course, may cause problems –
But these will not be too serious
When we start thinking through God’s infinitely greater mind –
Resorting to our “no mind” –
Which enables us to observe the world, as well as our own minds,
Critically – “from the outside.”

Later, however, when we’ve actually gone ahead and lost our minds –
We’ll find we also need to lose our names as well –